Thursday, March 10, 2011

Muslim scholars write to Israeli - in perfect Hebrew

Professor Shmuel Moreh .. .keeping the channels open

A pall of thick antisemitism, denial and hostility to Jews and Israel weighs heavily upon the Arab world. Now and again, however, chinks of light pierce through the darkness: Arab Muslims who take a sympathetic and serious academic interest in Jews of the Middle East.

Thus it was with undisguised pleasure that for the first time Professor Shmuel Moreh, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, received emails from two Iraqi Muslims written in perfect Hebrew.

Dr Jabbar Jamal al-Din is a professor of Jewish philosophy at Al-Kufa University in southern Iraq. Mr. Fakhri Issa researches Hebrew literature at the University of Berlin.

Dr Jamal al-Din and Mr Fakhri Issa were responding to an invitation in Hebrew to an event featuring the writer Eli Amir and the poet Jacob Jacob at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Israel. Here is an extract from Mr Issa's email in Hebrew:

1 comment:

Sylvia
said...

Telegraph Journalist Ed White:"everyone knows that large numbers of Jews fled from Europe and in particular the Nazis, and that as a consequence roughly one million Arabs fled Palestine in 1948. Yet few BBC viewers would know that 750,000 Jews fled from Arab countries during the same period, a historical fact that completely alters the issue (the difference is that they’re not still in camps)."

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)